I am a retired tough love angel who is tough when the situation calls for it but otherwise expects smart people to find their way with soft love.

Nokia Startups Mistake #10 – Go-To-Market Strategy

Selling an unknown product built by an unknown startup is not easy. Some Nokia-based startups do have marvelous go-to-market plans that could work but only if the startup had both the credibility and resources of a larger, more established company.

As they don’t have either, the plans will most likely fail miserably. Every startup desperately needs an entry point to its market, an entry point to close the first customer, then second, and so on. Problems with go-to-market strategies stem from not understanding customers and their needs well enough, and perhaps with Nokia background it is just a little bit easier to have an attitude problem and think that distribution and scaling up are not a big issues – as they never were while working at Nokia. Yeah, right.

I hope you will enjoy this series, the thoughts it provokes, and the discussion it triggers. Please do participate to the discussion by sharing your own angle and experiences on this topic, or commenting on something, anything on this post. The preferred place for discussion is the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ToughLoveAngel.